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Highland New Guinea
Highland New Guinea is a collection of around 200 different groups of people with a population of several million which was untouched until the 1930s. It was a dense society with an extremely advanced system of agriculture that was used for over 7,000 years, the worlds longest experiment in sustainable food production. Decision-Making Villages in Highland New Guinea used democratic assemblies which strived for consensus. An anthropologist visiting the are described it as the "ultra-democratic extreme of bottom up decision-making".Jared Diamond (2005) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed Within each village, instead of hereditary leaders or chiefs, there were just individuals, called "big-men", who by force of personality were more influential than other individuals but still lived in a hut like everybody else's and still tilled a garden like anybody else's. Decisions were (and often still are today) reached by means of everybody in the village sitting down together and talking, and talking, and talking. The big-men couldn't give orders, and they might or might not succeed in persuading others to adopt their proposals. These measures were highly successful despite extreme conditions. There was a highly dense population that lacked metal tools and electricity who were often spread out across hundreds of kilometers, the mountains themselves were brutal, as villagers had to contend with snowstorms, heavy rain, droughts, earthquakes, volcano eruptions and a high population. Not only that, but their existence for seven thousand years meant they dealt with numerous small ice ages, global droughts, volcanic fallout, the arrival of Europeans, disease outbreaks, climate change and the introduction of a population explosion due to modern medicine being introduced. Yet still these communities survived. This proves definitively that democratic assemblies can sustain themselves longer than any state in history and exist in complex and rapidly changing systems. Economy Villages in Highland New Guinea had no system of currency nor evidence of a centrally planned economy, likely making it anarcho-communist in nature. Using this, they were able to sustainably exist for seven thousand years and construct numerous housing that could fit all people, as well as common ownership of land. When problems like deforestation and soil loss threatened communities, there was a very strong incentive to look for solutions to these problems and develop new methods of agriculture to prevent them. When airplanes chartered by biologists and miners first flew over the interior in the 1930s, for the pilots to see below them a landscape transformed by millions of people previously unknown to the outside world. The scene looked like the most densely populated areas of Holland: broad open valleys with few clumps of trees, divided as far as the eye could see into neatly laid-out gardens separated by ditches for irrigation and drainage, terraced steep hillsides reminiscent of Java or Japan, and villages surrounded by defensive stockades. Innovation was also very strong in Highland New Guinea, being one of only nine societies in the world to discover agriculture. Numerous efforts to stop environmental destruction and agricultural techniques so advanced and efficient that they baffled European agronomists and scientists attempting to learn from them. Environmental Protection Villages in Highland New Guinea had numerous methods for protecting the environment, which allowed them to sustainably farm and build things for seven thousand years, methods such as: * Vertical drainage ditches to prevent flooding of gardens * Adding weeds, grass, old vines and other organic matter to the soil to compost it * Using ash, cut vegetation, rotting logs, chicken poo as mulch and fertilizer * Crop rotation to keep nitrogen levels in the soil stable * Extensive reforestation efforts to keep nitrogen stable and to ensure a supply of wood for fuel and construction Culture People from Highland New Guinea have been described very positively by foreign anthropologists: New Guineans are more curious and experimental than any other poeple that I have encountered. When in my early years in New Guinea I saw someone who had acquired a pencil, which was still an unfamiliar object then, the pencil would be tried out for a myriad purposes other than writing: a hair decoration? a stabbing tool? something to chew on? a long earring? a plug through the pierced nasal septum? Whenever I take New Guineans to work with me in areas away from their own village, they are constantly picking up local plants, asking local people about the plants' uses, and selecting some of the plants to bring back with them and try growing at home. References